


Falconry

by anactoria



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Fluff and Angst, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-16
Updated: 2014-04-16
Packaged: 2018-01-19 14:55:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 324
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1473919
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anactoria/pseuds/anactoria
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Cas likes to feed the birds.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Falconry

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by [this](http://beefbasket.tumblr.com/post/79811876568/i-have-this-dumb-headcanon-that-castiel-is-fond-of) lovely fanart on Tumblr. Not set at any particular point in canon; unbetaed.

Cas likes to feed the birds. He can sit so still he looks like something carved from stone, until they hop right on up and eat out of his hand. They’ll eye him curiously, then, and he’ll do that head-tilt thing of his right back at them, a whole silent conversation going on between them.

Dean privately ( _really_ privately) thinks it’s kinda sweet, right up until he looks out the window and catches Cas watching a blackbird rip the pink-brown guts out of a worm with the exact same expression he’d wear to watch a sparrow pick seed out of his palm. Then, he remembers something he read as a kid that weirded him out, about how birds are the only living descendants of dinosaurs, with the same raptor talons and flat reptilian eyes. Killing machines atrophied down to these little flapping feathery things.

He’d thought that birds of prey were the only real ones, after that.

And it reminds him of how _old_ Cas is, how the human face and the human voice are just the tip of the iceberg. How the man Dean calls _family_ is an aspect of something bigger, more alien, less comprehensible than that. 

It’s easy to forget. Dean prays and Cas flies to his side like a hunter’s hawk coming in to land—but Dean has no real way to know why, no clue what’s actually going on inside Cas’s head. Or whatever Cas really has, instead of a head. 

The thought feels like vertigo, and he turns away from the window.

(Months later, when Cas is human and dazed by it, doesn’t know what the hell to do with himself, Dean sits down beside him with a bag of birdseed from the pet store. They stay very still, side by side, and Dean talks shit about dinosaurs until Cas stops staring off at lost infinities and meets his eyes, comes in to rest beside him, comes home.)


End file.
